Scent of a Woman
by Layla Reyne
Summary: Damon's ghostly existence is not so different from his previous life, save for one thing.


**Scent of a Woman**

**By: Layla Reyne**

**Summary**: Damon's ghostly existence is not so different from his previous life, save for one thing. One-shot; complete.

**A/N**: Big thanks to Sandra (dutchtreat) for providing beta assistance, as she is a master at this second person point of view thing, and to Chelley (chellethebelle) for the pre-read input! Title borrowed from the 1992 Pacino/O'Donnell movie of the same name.

**Disclaimer**: The characters and other things from The Vampire Diaries are not mine. All due credit to the rightful holders.

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It's really no surprise that your ghostly existence doesn't differ all that much from your previous reality as a living dead thing.

You're relegated to the sidelines, and no one listens to you, even when it's Little Gilbert repeating your words. It's just like old times; you trust no one, they trust all the wrong ones – Klaus, Shane, other Hunters. You scream and rant, eliciting curses, eye-rolls and a myriad of rude gestures from Jeremy and Ric, but in the end, the village idiots – your brother chief among them – either ignore your advice or veer so far off course that it's one giant clusterfuck after the next. And much like on their side, here on the other side there's always a Bennett witch offering her color commentary and attributing blame to you.

You watch them all, and you watch her. Every now and then, you see her pause, fidgeting and casting her eyes downward, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, and you think maybe this will be the time when she finally speaks up, but then Stefan or Caroline barrels on and she slumps back into the cushions or into a shadowy corner. She tried once, was promptly chided and quickly overruled, and since then, she's kept her inner Warrior Princess hidden, only letting it out to play with her brother when they're scheming an alternate plan of attack. Just like you would have done. You smirk because you taught them well, but then your crooked smile fades because you want so badly for her to reclaim her voice and take the wheel. Hell, she's earned it more than the rest of them, helping to kill not one but two originals and daggering two others. She's taken the Camaro in your absence, why can't she take your seat at the table too. Two Gilberts firmly, vocally, on your side would be better than one. But you're left longing on her behalf.

And that's another thing that hasn't changed – your longing for her, in one form or another. When you're not trying to divert a disaster, you watch and you listen to her every move. You spend your evenings perched on her window seat while she goes about her nightly routine – combing out her hair, brushing her teeth and donning one of the t-shirts or button downs she nicked from your closet, which simultaneously warms your heart and makes you twitch because they're getting more wrinkled every day that she refuses to wash them. Once she's settled in, you lay on the bed beside her and she tells you about her day, knowing that you're there.

You recall how that little secret slipped out. During the first week after your death, she took up permanent semi-catatonic residence in your room. And while part of you was awed that her grief for you ran so deep, another part of you needed her to get out of that bed and live her life, to make your death mean something. Finally, after you revealed yourself and threatened, via Jeremy, to leave if she didn't get back to her friends, her family and heaven-forbid, maybe even school, she returned home and her nightly soliloquies began.

And you love it, love her, more with each passing word that falls from her lips, because there is no more sire bond, no more doubt – you believe her, you know that it's real.

And fuck do your fingers itch and burn to touch her, which reminds you of the things that _are_ different about your current ghostly predicament. You can see her, hear her, but you can no longer feel her, no longer taste her.

For so long it was just the graze of fingers or bodies when you purposely invaded her space, a hug when you least expected it, didn't even know you needed it, and, of course, the unforgettable flashes of passion when your lips met and the fire that was buried just beneath the surface of your "friendship" threatened to consume you both.

Even when you finally surrendered to that fire, spending the night wrapped in each others arms, sweat-slicked skins gliding and thrusting together as you became intimately familiar with the taste of every delectable inch of her skin, the location of every secret pleasure point inside and out of her, making love several times before and after the sun came up, it was just that – one single, perfect, blissfully ignorant night.

But what really haunts your heart and eats away at your soul every second of every day of your after-after-life is how much you long for her scent. You can vividly bring to mind certain good and bad moments in your relationship with her based on that one sense.

The faint trace of smoke and alcohol from the bonfire mixed with the smell of her shampoo, the same brand she uses still, and the other indefinable scent that is the very essence of her, which, in combination with her lively eyes and racing heartbeat, convinced you that it wasn't Katherine standing in front of you, flirting with you, on that deserted road.

The first time you smelled her blood, when she was dressed in that ridiculous nurse's costume, full of anger, resentment and enough moxy to haul off and slap you, a one hundred seventy year old vampire. And that's when you decided you'd willingly fight your bloodlust for her, gladly wage war against your very nature, if it meant staying close to that kind of fire.

Smoke again, this time mingled with freshly turned dirt and the stench of betrayal, on both your parts, when she fooled you into trusting her and you shoved your blood down her throat to force your brother's hand. Before letting her go, you buried your nose in her hair, taking in one last deep breath of her in case she never forgave you, never let you close again.

But never didn't last very long and soon she was close once more, her scent amplified to the nth degree as you stood in the rain and cupped her face for the first of many times, witnessing her loyalty and how deeply she cared for others, even a damned creature such as your brother. And in that instant, you were overcome with the need to comfort her and the desire that maybe one day she'd show you the same kind of devotion.

You recall the fateful day when you pulled her into your arms and led her in a dance that was older than even you. The fresh, cool autumn day was tinged by the hairspray that held her hair in soft curls and the cherry-scented lip-gloss that tempted you to a tortuous edge. You realized right then and there that you were in love with her.

Those curls and that lip-gloss, together with your own brush with death and delusions of hope, distracted you, fooled you, when Katherine showed up dressed in her clothing, causing you to accidentally bare your resurrected soul to the devil herself. When you – dirty, ruffled and reeking of bourbon – visited her later the next night, you found her freshly cleaned, smelling of soap and shampoo, with her hair straight again. Your world was back on its rightful axis for a moment until she ripped your heart out with the exact same words as her vampire ancestor, so you impulsively returned the favor, making the biggest mistake of your abnormally long life.

She somehow forgave you, miraculously, for that and all the other things that you'd done to hurt her, intentional or not, and her slender arms, choked words and salty tears wrapped you up and comforted you as you laid dying in your bed.

Your time together when Stefan was physically and then emotionally missing was nearly your undoing. Her scent accentuated by the slow moving water that lapped against your waists as you stood nose to nose arguing in a mountain lake. Her blood dripping from the IV bag when you rescued her from the enemy's clutches. Her sweat and arousal permeating the air that afternoon you called her Buffy, deemed her your Warrior Princess and vowed to protect her, even from your brother. All leading up to the night when she confessed that she wouldn't know what to do if you weren't there. Neither the stink of the headless hybrid's blood on her front porch nor your own guilt were enough to stop the inevitable meeting of your lips.

After she died, you wondered if she would smell the same, but when you held her in your arms for the first time since the worst night of your life, letting her drink from one hand while the other tangled in her hair, you realized that _everything_ about her was magnified. And as you lost yourself in a stolen moment of ecstasy, "kind of personal" became a colossal understatement.

A week later you almost lost her again, and the smell of her sun-seared flesh still features prominently in your nightmares. Thankfully, you were with her then, not your brother, and in the ultimate twist of fate and irony, you and the waters beneath Wickery Bridge saved her. You weren't lying; from the second she opened her eyes later that morning, giving you a soft look the likes of which had never been directed at you before, she was more alive than you'd ever seen her.

The day she finally gave all of herself to you was the very definition of sensory overload, an exploding microcosm of past moments reflected back at you. Hairspray and lip-gloss invading your nostrils as the word "You" echoed loudly in your ears. The hint of her blood trailing down the stairs and out onto the manor lawn where you witnessed her telling Stefan to let her go. Whiskey lingering on both your breaths and smoke wafting around your bodies as you smashed your lips to hers and hitched her thigh around your hip, pushing her up against the fireplace mantle and feeling her hardened nipples press into your bare chest and the heat of her center rub deliciously against your own hardness. The dizzying aroma of her arousal when you buried your nose in her dark curls, inhaling deeply as your tongue separated her folds, plunging inside to savor her essence before skirting up to tease her clit, taking your time to pleasure her despite your own desperate need to be buried to the hilt inside her, because it was the sweetest smell you'd ever had the privilege of experiencing.

Things had spiraled quickly downhill thereafter. Forced apart by your own cosmic comeuppance – first with the sire bond and then Kol's compulsion to kill the one person you'd sworn to never kill again – you tried to take comfort in her declarations of love and earnest hugs, her scent giving you a few seconds of peace before your doubts as to the sincerity of both battered your heart and soul back into submission.

In your final moment together, she held you in her beaten arms and desperately offered you her open wrist, looking at you with the kind of devotion you first desired that day in the pouring rain. But you knew it was futile, knew that her blood was no match against the spell you sacrificed yourself for, so that her brother could be rid of his Hunter's destiny and have a normal life, family Christmases included. You wanted that for her, and you knew that your love would never be enough if her brother was dead. So you kissed her wrist gently, leveled Jeremy with one last determined glare, growled at him to get her the hell out of there and watched through increasingly hazy eyes as he dragged her away, kicking and screaming, tears streaming down both of your faces.

That was the last time you smelled her, and you miss it more than anything in the world…

She's trying to bring you back, working with Bonnie and the "good spirits" to broker a deal for your resurrection. But you're afraid of the cost of such magic, because you've learned the hard way that magic never comes without a steep price. Will it require another sacrifice? Will you come back a vampire or a human? And if the latter, you worry that you won't be able to protect her. But in the back of your mind and in the recesses of your heart, your biggest fear is that _the_ most cherished of your senses, especially when it comes to her, will be diminished. That you'll no longer be able to dissect a smell in order to distinguish the elements, to read her emotions, to catalogue the defining moments of your relationship with her.

That you'll no longer be able to fully appreciate the scent of the woman you love.

**THE END**

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